Friday 23 March 2007 20.31 EDT
First published on Friday 23 March 2007 20.31 EDT

Nothing Like a Dame: The Scandals of Shirley Porterby Andrew Hosken(Granta, £9.99)

I almost envy younger readers who may only have a faint idea who Shirley Porter is. She remains, by a considerable margin, the most corrupt British public figure in living memory, with the possible exception of Robert Maxwell. But there was something exceptionally repellent about her abuse of office; a fantastically brazen quality which had to be seen to be believed.

Jenny Diski, reviewing this book in the LRB, detected a trace of anti-semitism in patrician attitudes to Porter; understandable, but to which one reasonable counter-claim might be that it didn't stop her from becoming leader of Westminster council. I might also add that one of the very few things in her favour was her Jewishness; in 1960 she helped expose 10 golf clubs across north London for holding anti-semitic membership criteria. A consistent theme that emerges when she applies for posts and doesn't get them is lack of intelligence, which is not usually the first reason given when it's the Jewishness that's the problem.

To get to the substance of the book you are going to have to surmount the considerable obstacle of its front cover. Diski calls this a "racial caricature", but it's not, it's a photograph, of Porter in her prime: the contemptuous stare, the alarming lipstick, the shoulder-pads. Memories of a whole era come roaring back. What you probably can't see in the reproduction printed here is the pendant hanging from her necklace: a smiley face in simple, flat silver. Yes, a smiley face. Never was anyone so unfittingly adorned.

She looks, in the picture, like someone for whom the word "ghastly" was specially minted. Margaret Thatcher used the word "scary"; that's right, too. But such epithets are grossly inadequate. Whatever you think of Porter now, your opinion will be severely downgraded a long way before you finish the book. You may start tending towards "monstrous", before you realise that adjective-hurling is not enough.

Many critics have praised the book for performing the unimaginable: making a story of local government fascinating. More than one commentator compared Nothing Like a Dame to a "thriller". I can see the point, and this is as much down to Hosken's writing as to the extraordinary material at his disposal; but no thriller I have read has a character so wicked that I have been forced to put the book down, every 50 pages or so, from genuine nausea. Porter's actions were sickening and made people, thousands of them, suffer. In some cases, as in those of the homeless people she shoved into two asbestos-ridden tower blocks, more suffering may still appear. Porter, daughter of Jack Cohen, founder of Tesco, decides to enter politics, and becomes a councillor. A trip to Soviet Russia hatches a bee in her bonnet about civic cleanliness. A taste for publicity stunts and control-freakery develops. Spooked by how close Labour came to winning control of Westminster council in 1986, she determines to sell off council housing to yuppies in key marginal wards.

Penny-pinching yet weirdly profligate, she sells three cemeteries for 15p to property speculators. She arranges for young thugs to jeer at bereaved families who protest. She kicks hundreds of homeless people out of their accommodation, and spends a fortune locking up the properties. She smears political opponents and fixes an artificially low poll tax. When caught, she is misleading about her personal wealth.

Hosken does not speculate too much about what made Porter so horrible. But she was; and this enthralling story tells you how corruption can happen, and how toxic the results can be.